Author Archives: Sophie Brown

“There are two main challenges when investigating procurement,” says Rinat Tuhvatshin, co-founder of Kloop, an independent media outlet in Kyrgyzstan. “We need to find a story and we need to make sure readers connect with it. The second part is the most difficult.”

With a suite of self-developed digital tools and innovative reporting techniques, Kloop is reinventing the way journalists expose corruption – from land grabs to election campaigning, money laundering and more recently in public procurement. A number of their tools rely on data from the government’s official public procurement platform, Zakupki.gov.kg, which publishes data according to the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).

The outlet’s reporting on irregularities in procurement has led to several official investigations and adjustments to contracts, as well as improvements in how the government manages procurement information.

The Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) met Tuhvatshin at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Hamburg recently, where he showed us how Kloop’s data-driven tools work while discussing the progress and challenges of opening up public procurement in the Kyrgyz Republic.

Rinat Tuhvatshin at GIJN Conference 2019 in Hamburg

Finding corruption story leads with business analytics

Their model is founded on the valuable insights created when combining a wealth of different sources and information-gathering techniques. One of their main tools for investigating procurement is a business intelligence platform, based on the free and open source software Apache Superset, which they use to find story leads.

The Kloop team scrapes data from the government’s Zakupki procurement platform using a scraping tool called Memorious, which was developed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). They aggregate the data with other data sources and analyze it to look for red flags. Or they set certain search parameters to answer specific questions that are not necessarily easy to understand on the government portal because of the way the data is presented.

Tuhvatshin gives an example: What do you know about the oil market in the Talas region of Kyrgyzstan? He says it is both very active and very corrupt.

“When you sell gasoline, diesel and so on, there are very few people who import it into Kyrgyzstan. But you have a lot of middlemen who are trying to sell it onwards.”

“If you try to ask this question on the [government’s] portal,” he says, “it’s going to take a very long time before you get any kind of insight. But here [on Kloop’s business intelligence portal] we downloaded everything and turned it into a different view so we can see how many deals are made and how much money is spent each day.”

You can filter by region, status, result, class of lot (what is being sold) and drill down to procurer or participant name.

A giant Sankey diagram effectively visualizes the volume of transactions and the participants involved. Government agencies buying oil products appear on the left and the entities selling them on the right. It’s immediately clear that the agency buying the most amount of gasoline gets almost its entire stock from one single seller (who Tuhvatshin points out is an individual, not a company). “In a minute, you have a general picture of what is going on.”

Drilling down into the details, they can get a sense of what is happening in the market and start asking probing questions.

“Lack of competition might make sense if it’s a very specialized supplier, but we can see that the seller is just providing regular gasoline,” says Tuhvatshin. Or perhaps the seller has other buyers in other regions. But the data shows they sell exclusively to only two water-related agencies.

“At this stage, I can’t say that anyone is doing anything wrong but it is a very good lead for investigation.”

The database scrapes data regularly, at different intervals depending on the urgency of the data, for example announcements from the procurement board are scraped hourly but data from other databases is updated daily, weekly or monthly.

Tuhvatshin says that getting the data would be much easier if the government procurement system had a public API (something that OCP strongly agrees with). Although Kloop manages because they have sophisticated data scraping skills (in fact they say it gives them a competitive advantage) adding an API to the government portal would make the data much more accessible to everyone. The government has committed to add this functionality to its system in early 2020, and already uses an API internally.

Crowdsourcing implementation data

Tuhvatshin stresses the importance of showing how the daily problems of Kyrgyz people are linked to wider systemic issues too. Otherwise readers will say “everyone does it [corruption], how does it affect us?”

For that, Kloop created an application called Budget Monitoring, which local NGOs and other civic actors use to verify potential anomalies identified in the data.

When Kloop’s editors find a lead related to a construction project on the business intelligence system, for example, they create an “assignment” on the Budget Monitoring app so people near that location can take pictures and upload them to the platform. Launched nine months ago, the app has allowed Kloop to expose at least 10 cases of suspected corruption, several of which are being investigated by authorities.

Kloop’s business intelligence tool and crowdsourcing app allowed them to investigate corruption in the construction of a school (the unfinished foundations of which are shown above), an underground tunnel and a road bridge.

Joining up the data and the field visits is crucial; neither by itself tells the complete story. For example, residents seeing a concrete slab near their house (see above) would have no idea that it’s supposed to be a school funded by their taxes. Meanwhile, the government portal wouldn’t tell you itself that something went wrong: the funds were spent so you wouldn’t know the school hasn’t been built.

“But if you connect up our analysis and expertise of local people, you get very interesting stories and very simple ones,” says Tuhvatshin. “And stories that cause a lot of emotions.”

Those emotions were on full display after a remarkable joint investigation by Kloop, the OCCRP and RFE/RL implicated the customs office in a massive money laundering racket that allegedly funneled close to $1 billion out of Kyrgyzstan illegally (to give a sense of the losses, the country’s entire GDP is around $7.5 billion). The revelations triggered public protests in Bishkek.

This is difficult and dangerous work. The whistleblower in the case was allegedly murdered, Kloop journalists have been subject to mass surveillance and a smear campaign in pro-government media, and their site has experienced persistent denial of service attacks, according to Bektour Iskender, Kloop’s other founder. Last week, a court in the capital ruled to freeze the bank accounts of the media consortium after a former customs official named in the alleged scheme sued them for defamation. The court reportedly reversed this order on Friday after the ex-official withdrew his petition to freeze the accounts, but the lawsuit remains. Iskender says they are looking forward to their day in court so they can show their allegations are true.

Although Kloop’s procurement work is relatively new, it has already seen some resounding successes. In 2016, they discovered some data was being entered into the official procurement system in a mix of Cyrillic and Latin characters, which prevented certain details from appearing in search results (this practice, known as “Cyrillic corruption”, is common in former Soviet countries and is an easy way to keep suspicious deals under the radar). Data analysis conducted by Kloop shows this practice has ceased following their investigation, according to Tuhvatshin.

“If you had an individual record, you wouldn’t be able to prove that they stopped the practice. But when you have an entire database, you can show it.”

They also published an investigation into major printing mistakes in textbooks. “Nobody paid any attention for a year before…and now the ministry has promised to make these companies reprint them,” says Tuhvatshin. (Kloop has not yet verified whether this has happened).

Unpicking conflicts of interest

Kloop also uses procurement data to investigate which government officials have ties to companies that win public contracts. They combine data from the Ministry of Justice, with data on company founders and directors, and asset declarations of public officials.

Typically, the company director will not be a serving official but one of their relatives. In Kyrgyzstan, where the language follows Patronymic naming conventions, these ties are comparatively easy to spot.

Tuhvatshin shows me an example by searching for all companies that are related to government officials and all companies that participate in public procurement. He points out that when casting such a wide net, the results return a lot of false positives, so you need to look at each case one-by-one, until at some point you can find your lead.

“If you know the context in Kyrgyzstan, you can use it.”

Alerts for business opportunities

Kloop is also experimenting with app-based subscription services such as their “Tenderbot” to alert businesses to tender opportunities, pulling information from Kloop’s database, which draws on OCDS records available in the government system.

Image: Screenshots of ‘Tenderbot’ app for businesses

Open tools

For now, Kloop’s red flag tool is only accessible to staff, but they plan to make it open to the public in 2020, allowing anyone to use the existing filters or uploading their own data to make comparisons. Later, when the system is stable, they’d like to give users more rights to verify project implementation by adding requests to the Budget Monitoring app directly so local actors can check suspected irregularities against evidence from site visits.

“It’s our dream that in the future, people all over will collaborate and make it so transparent that corruption is going to be impossible.”

They would like to share their expertise and see their tools replicated in other countries. Adapting it would be relatively straightforward as their red flag tool is based on free and open source software.

With the help of standardized, open data on public contracts and new networks of collaboration, the Kloop collective has kicked off a wave of innovative approaches to better understand the Kyrgyz procurement market, helping to expose corruption, improve the access of small business to tender opportunities and ensure taxpayers’ money is spent as planned. Reach out to us here if you would like to connect with them and learn even more of their tricks and tips to monitor contracts and hold government to account.

Participation and inclusion are big themes at this year’s Open Government Partnership Summit, and they underpin our new strategy to make public contracting radically fairer, more efficient, and more responsive. We want to go beyond opening data to build robust open ecosystems that engage new, diverse actors to get better results. We recently spoke to 2018 School of Data Fellow Odanga Madung about how an open contracting approach has been used in Kenya to make valuable – but technical -insights from oversight authorities more accessible to key civic actors for accountability.

You don’t have to look far to find a corruption scandal in the news in Kenya – arrests, probes, kickbacks, and billion-dollar embezzlements all make the headlines regularly. But what are the systemic causes behind these incidents?

“Corruption isn’t something that just happens,” says Odanga Madung, a Kenyan data scientist and 2018 School of Data Fellow. “It’s financial engineering. It has a very considered plan with various actors. There’s a cycle to it.”

Oversight authorities are responsible for examining these dynamics, but when it comes to the public, there is little understanding of how corruption actually works, Madung says. This makes it difficult for the media, NGOs and civilians to hold the government to account.

Last year, Madung worked on a study by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) that sought to shift the way people think about corruption, to go beyond the one-off scandals and dramatic loss of public funds often described in the media after the fact, and instead look at how public policy might be adjusted to address the broader systemic issues and prevent corruption from happening in the future.

The IEA analyzed the reports of one of Kenya’s key oversight bodies, the Auditor General’s Office, which examines how the government and its agencies spend taxpayers’ money. These reports have consistently revealed corruption and other irregularities in how public funds are used, with most of the reported misappropriations linked to breaches in procurement requirements. These PDF documents can be very technical and are designed to provide an assessment of the state of each government entity’s accounts, looking in particular at how complete the entity’s record keeping is, and how well it adheres to procedures and budgets.

The IEA looked at the Auditor General’s findings through a procurement lense. They restructured the information into an open contracting framework, in order to track the systemic loss of public funds through the procurement cycle and determine which stages of the process were most at risk. The Auditor General’s reports scrutinize the financial statements of each government entity against proposed budget plans and contractual obligations from 2013 to 2016. If the Auditor General gave an entity’s accounts anything other than a clean bill of health, the IEA noted where in the procurement process the problem occurred – the pre-tender, tender or post-award phase. They mainly focused on the health and education sectors, because of their large budgets and importance for public welfare.

Diagram: The IEA’s study uses a simplified procurement cycle model with 3 stages to make it easier for journalists and the public to understand, whereas the procurement cycle model used for the Open Contracting Data Standard has 5 stages.

Findings: Violations show up in the post-award stage of procurement; gaps in records

The IEA’s analysis revealed that most of the problems happened in the post-award stage of the procurement process, in which the contract is managed, the order is fulfilled and the contractor is paid. In the health ministry, 82% of the 63 violations of procurement regulations over three years occurred at the post-award stage (with most in the order fulfillment and payment process (61%), followed by contract management (19%), and the rest at the pre-tendering stage (with most in planning and budgeting process at 16%).

Unsupported expenditure was the most common type of violation in the health ministry at 40%, followed by abuses by the supplier in performing the contract at 22%.

In the education sector, most violations occur at the post-award stage (63%), in particular, during contract management (39%), followed by order and payment (22%). The most common violations were abuses by suppliers in performing the contract (24%), followed by lack of access to procurement records (20%).

But Madung says, even if the majority of violations might happen in the post-award stage, that doesn’t necessarily mean these are the most significant violations.

“Each phase has to be taken with its own context and importance,” he says. “Corruption in some ways is built into our budget. It starts with how people campaign to get into power, from the budget planning phase. A lot of the time we set ourselves up to fail, but it turns up in the post-award phase.”

The Auditor General’s reports also revealed major gaps in the government’s record keeping. Only about one in four financial statements gave a true and fair view of the entity’s financial position (using the Auditor General’s terminology, they were given “unqualified opinions”). These entities have a comparatively low combined annual expenditure – Ksh 42.1 billion (around US$414 million) in FY 2015/16, or 4% of total expenditure, although this figure is on the rise from Ksh 12.3 billion (US$121 million) in FY 2013/14.

Around half of the statements had minor problems: the auditor obtained all the information required for an audit, but there were limited violations of procedures and budgets (these are rated as “qualified opinions”). But since these entities account for at least 80% of total expenditure – for example, Ksh 932 billion (around US$9.1 billion) in the most recent report from FY2015/16 – cumulatively this presents potential risk of systemic financial loss, according to the IEA.

Although the proportion of financial statements with pervasive problems (rated as “adverse opinions”) has decreased over three years, these entities have a large combined annual expenditure (Ksh 301 billion [US$3 billion] in 2013/14 down to Ksh 86 billion [US$847 million] in 2015/16).

Cases have become more common in which the financial records are so poor the auditor can’t establish whether expenditures were incurred lawfully and effectively (known as a “disclaimer opinion”), increasing from 9% in FY2013/14 to 14% in FY2015/16. The combined expenditure of entities that received this rating in FY2015/16 was Ksh 91 billion (US$896 million).

Recommendations

The IEA made a number of recommendations for Kenya to address these violations in the procurement cycle and gaps in its documentation. These include:

adopting the open contracting principles and data standard to create better mechanisms for tracking public contracts, particularly in the post-award stage in which most of the violations seem to occur;

Oversight bodies like the Auditor General produce a wealth of credible information – which is often underutilized – about public spending, adherence to procurement regulations and how corruption happens. The challenge is to make this information accessible for people so they can use it effectively to advocate for change. Exercises like the IEA’s study are just the start, but Madung is hopeful that they can make a difference, by empowering citizens and civil society to look beyond the outrageous headlines and think about what systemic reforms might best enhance transparency and accountability in public contracting.

Standardizing tender forms should lead to an increase in the number of bidders per tender for public works projects this year.

Summary: In an effort to make public procurement more competitive, Colombia is exploring ways to encourage more companies to bid for public contracts. More competition in procurement will help the government obtain better works and services for fairer prices, from more qualified companies. More bidders also means a lower risk of cronyism and bid-rigging. Input from industry stakeholders and data analysis have been key to understanding the reasons for low participation and finding a solution in public works contracts in particular. In April 2019, Colombia began using standard tender documents for public transport infrastructure [.zip download], to make the contracting process more transparent and prevent tender specifications from being tailored to favor particular bidders. This move comes after industry associations analyzed official data and discovered that the majority of tenders for such projects had only one bidder, using the data from PDFs on the platform run by the public procurement agency. A new fully transactional platform, which exports data in the Open Contracting Data Standard format, will make it possible to calculate the impact of these reforms later in 2019, and will make conducting this analysis faster and easier in the future. Meanwhile, the government is using open contracting data to track progress towards its goal of increasing the average number of bidders per tender for central government entities by 5% in 2019.

“Contractor” had become a dirty word synonymous with corruption, explains the SCI’s president, Argelino Durán Ariza.

For several years, civil engineers and other potential suppliers had complained about the problems they faced in bidding for government contracts because these firms rarely met the requirements of the tender specifications, which were often so narrow that the SCI believed they were being tailored to benefit particular bidders.

“The biggest blow was dealt to local small and medium-sized companies who [didn’t win contracts] unless they agreed to pay bribes,” Durán Ariza said.

So the SCI began to gather factual evidence to assess the complaints they had heard about suspicious hiring practices for contractors among some municipalities, entities in Bogotá, and departments (regional governments). They wanted to use data to find out whether tender specifications often included unreasonable conditions and if this correlated with low bidder numbers. Such findings, in turn, could be indicative of potential of corruption serving illicit interests in hiring, according to Durán Ariza.

Using contracting data to research competition

The SCI analyzed data available on government websites to determine how many companies bid for contracting processes, focusing on three competitive methods: open tenders (the default method), abbreviated open tenders (meaning the process is accelerated), and merit contests (when quality is prioritized, such as for consultancy services, architectural designs, etc.). Later, in 2016, they also analyzed reverse auctions (for standardized goods and services, in which price is prioritized). Some data elements that were particularly useful included the identities of suppliers, award values, types of contract, and the number of bidders.

They used data from Colombia’s SECOP I procurement platform to do their calculations. Launched in 2007 by the public procurement agency Colombia Compra Eficiente, the platform stores PDFs of tender and contract documents, and some limited data fields. Although open data is exported from SECOP I, the number of bidders per tender wasn’t historically captured as a specific data field (in fact it wasn’t even possible to calculate it). So the SCI manually checked the PDF documents of thousands of tenders available on the platform. This also allowed them to cross-reference the PDFs against data entered manually by public officials, where they found human error led to data quality issues.

Analysis like the SCI’s should be faster and easier in the future, when the new fully transactional e-procurement platform SECOP II, which was launched in 2015, becomes the principal platform for more government entities, especially at the national level. The platform publishes data in the open, standardized, and reusable Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) format. It stores PDFs but also many more data fields, including numbers of bidders, in real time. In some years, once every entity is obliged to use SECOP II for conducting competitive processes, suppliers will register to submit a bid on the system and the number of bidders will be calculated automatically from this data, as well as other important statistics.

In 2017, the SCI found that there was only one bidder on more than half (56%) of all department contracts awarded that year (in total, more than 2,500 contracts worth over COP 1 trillion). At the municipal level, 21,500 contracts were awarded for more than COP 8 trillion – 94% of which had three or fewer bidders.

Making the case for standard tender documents

Working in coordination, both groups took their research to authorities who had the power to investigate irregularities further, as well as those who could introduce new regulations to reduce the corruption risk for new procurement processes.

In theory, there can be other reasons for low participation in tenders beyond specifications being manipulated; capacity can be an issue, particularly in the very specialized sector of infrastructure, where very sophisticated technical skills are required and are often difficult to find locally.

As a result of the industry groups’ findings, the national government made it mandatory to use standard tender documents for public transport works. These documents (.zip download) outline very specific requirements or targets that bidders must meet in order to participate in the tender process and win contracts (for example, the firm must have at least X years experience in carrying out similar projects). This information relates to transparency agreements, basic bidding letters, past experience, organizational capacity, financial status, social clauses to hire local staff, among others.Standard documents like these are important in cases where there is a high risk of corruption, but they’re also useful for small entities that have limited capacity since they can use ready-made documents instead of spending time and resources preparing bespoke specifications.

While the studies of SCI and CCI did not cover national entities, the central government has also shown a strong interest in growing competition at the national level. It recently launched areporton competition across central procuring entities in 2018 and set a goal to increase the average number of bidders per tender for the central government by 5% in 2019, as outlined in the public procurement agency’saction plan. Academic research suggests single-bid contracts are more expensive on average, so increasing the number of bidders could lead to greater savings for the government.

The range of different companies that win contracts could be another important indicator for measuring competition, with the aim of having a larger pool of suppliers. This could be calculated using SECOP data, although it is not currently a target in the agency’s action plan.

The main central government institution that contracts public works (INVIAS) has seen a surge in number of bidders when using standard tender documents for its own procurement processes, so when the SCI and CCI released their findings, there was a strong argument to expand the experience to subnational level entities (departments and municipalities).

Despite some concerns over potential loss of autonomy among local governments, the new law was enacted in January 2018, and use of the standard tender documents became mandatory in April 2019.

It will be possible to calculate the impact of these changes later in the year, with an increase in the number of bidders expected. They have a special relevance for road works as Colombia embarks on a major project to build tertiary roads across the country. There is also interest in expanding the scope of the reforms to other sectors.

In this series of data use stories, we highlight examples of open contracting from around the world and across a diverse range of availability of data, technical sophistication, and local contexts. The stories explore how data can be used to explore the role of public contracts for solving specific public policy questions and social problems through open contracting. Many of the initiatives and the amazing people driving them are part of wider efforts to open up public procurement. But while sustainable impact will take some time, we can see the ripple effects of these open contracting efforts already.

Chile’s Carabineros police force has an “exclusive club” of suppliers that win contracts through risky, non-competitive procurement processes, according to government figures. In 2017, a massive 81% of the Carabineros’ purchases were direct awards, compared to 19% on average for other central government institutions. It’s just one of the finding by the civil society group, Observatorio del Gasto Fiscal en Chile (Observatorio Fiscal), which assesses competition in public procurement by analyzing open data generated by the government’s e-procurement system.

Created in 2003, Chile’s public procurement system has gradually matured over the years, with the number of public bodies required to use its transactional e-portal increasing substantially.

The marketplace has grown, with spending rising from CLP$ 4.3 trillion in 2008 to CLP$ 7.8 trillion in 2017 (from US$ 6.3 billion to US$11.5 billion), about 4% of GDP. And in turn, more open data has become available.

But open contracting data isn’t useful if it isn’t used. With that in mind, ChileCompra, the Chilean public procurement authority, and several civil society organizations began working together in 2017 to increase data use and scrutiny of the enormous public marketplace.

Observatorio Fiscal was one of the first civil society organizations to start using the data. Led by Executive Director Jeannette von Wolfersdorff, the non-profit describes its approach as “data-based activism.” Its mission is to bring more transparency and integrity to public expenditure and the public market.

“When you don’t have the right incentives, you don’t have a fair market,” says von Wolfersdorff.

Public spending at a municipal level was one of the organization’s first focus areas. It created visualizations to show important details, such as who the municipalities buy from, what and how much they purchase and for what price.

In September 2018, Observatorio Fiscal launched a new microsite Public Buying Observatory that looks at actual competition in both national and municipal procurement through in-depth analysis and visualizations. With the data updated quarterly, the site explores key questions, including how do state institutions buy their goods and services? How often are public tenders, direct awards and framework agreements used? How much competition is there? Which companies are supplying what? Observatorio Fiscal also provides an analysis of what data are missing to get a more precise evaluation of competition levels, with a specific focus on company information.

This analysis has informed other efforts to increase integrity in government, through a working group made up of ChileCompra, Observatorio Fiscal and other civil society organizations such as Chile Transparente. In particular, the group has been working on the health and construction sectors and advocating for Chile to create a beneficial ownership register, which would involve an amendment to the national procurement law

Meanwhile, the open data is also being used to identify red flags. Taking advantage of their independence as civil society groups, Observatorio Fiscal and other NGOs like Chile Transparente and Espacio Público analyze the data and discuss their findings with the government procurement agency, ChileCompra, who shares a mutual interest in ensuring accountability in the sector. These conversations have been formalized through a “data committee” that meets periodically.

Jeannette von Wolfersdorff: Developing a clear strategy for collaboration with other open society organizations, industry associations, and government [through] public-private agreements. That must include connecting beneficial ownership data to open contracting, and working for a more competitive market. For example, our last data analysis showed that we have a problem with hospital procurement. Who gets the money? That’s what we’re trying to show. Of course, that is not easy without quality beneficial ownership data. Nor is it easy to understand whether the goods and services bought by the hospitals really represent the best value for money.

The pharmaceutical market is so complicated to understand that, without specific pharma knowledge, it is hard to determine whether hospitals might have conflicts of interest in their procurement. One example: a hospital could purchase a new medicine that might have a 20% better absorption than the generic medicines available. But maybe it is manufactured by just one laboratory and is 10 times more expensive than the more competitive generics, which are produced by a number of other laboratories. To understand cases like these, it is important to consider a more coordinated approach between independent (!) pharma experts, the national budget institution, the procurement institution and finally civil society. Together they should build a council that supervises hospital purchasing. In that sense, it is important, not only to renew public-private alliances, but also to think about more sector-specific monitoring of public procurement.

What are the challenges you’ve faced and how are you overcoming them?

JvW: We are still facing data quality problems and significant gaps in procurement data. We think there will soon be progress regarding beneficial ownership data, by bringing together the voices of NGOs working on integrity and transparency, with the voices of public providers, and working united with the team of ChileCompra. We are analyzing how to change our procurement law, and civil society has also worked together, in the last months, to include a national beneficial ownership register in the fourth OGP National Action Plan. These are positive steps in the right direction. If Chile develops a national register, it must be connected with procurement data. Enforcing the quality of beneficial ownership data would be very beneficial for the transparency of the procurement market. Having said that, without a doubt, the most important challenge for us, regarding our actual public-private collaboration in Chile is to find the right balance between collaborative action with the government and applying positive pressure.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned thus far?

JvW: When you don’t have the right incentives, you don’t have a fair market. It’s very important to improve our legal systems to prevent corruption. On the other hand, we learned that the interests of suppliers are different than the interests of civil society. Suppliers want to compete but civil society wants transparency. But the one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other: right now, we’re seeing small steps where providers and civil society are talking together and showing that a fairer, more transparent system means more market competition.

What are the next steps for you?

JvW: We want to create a register of beneficial owners that is open to the public. First, just for the procurement market, and then for Chile, connecting the national data with the procurement database. There is a lot of work to do to get this done. Regarding data, we plan to deepen our analysis, especially for the health and construction sector, with the aim of sharing more open information about the competitiveness of the market. Finally, I must mention that for our first steps, we are really very happy to have had support – financial and strategic – from the Open Contracting Partnership team. Thanks!